


Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp Randall Fraser

by azuredragonsleeps



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 16:41:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5097746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azuredragonsleeps/pseuds/azuredragonsleeps
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Claire Beauchamp found herself stranded, away from everything she knew and thought to herself: I can be useful here."<br/>Claire had many different names over the years, and they all meant something to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp Randall Fraser

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a short piece about Claire that I couldn't get out of my head. It's unbeta'd and my first time publishing on here so apologies for any mistakes.

Claire Beauchamp had taken the name Randall because she had loved Frank, and because she’d wanted, after all those years of drifting, following her uncle, to have something to hang on to. She had loved her husband through a world war, clung tight to him and made him hers. But she’d found herself during that war, realised that she was someone who couldn’t _not_ give what help she could, someone who was of use, someone with a purpose. She loved Frank, but she’d been Claire Beauchamp again for a while before she gave it as her name in a panic in a forest long ago.

Claire Beauchamp found herself stranded, away from everything she knew and thought to herself: I can be useful here.

She thought other things too, about getting home, about Frank, but something in her was a combat nurse again as soon as she fell through those stones (she would never again stop being that, a healer, a wise woman). It took her a long time to realise it (a marriage and a trial and a choice) but Claire had fallen through time and reached a home.

Claire Beauchamp wore the name Fraser like a badge. Not at first (not until a choice on a hilltop, or maybe not until a moment in an abbey), but she did. Claire Fraser was needed, she had a place, a lover and a home. The kind of home she had always wanted. It didn’t come with a vase, but it was hers. She was thrust into the unknown and she carved out a place for herself. She fought for it too. She broke into a prison, made a deal with a king, joined a rebellion, because she knew how to deal with the impossible, the unbearable. You did what needed to be done.

Sometimes, when she wasn’t feeling quite so brave, Claire put her hands in the dirt and closed her eyes. It was the one thing that was always the same, no matter where or when she was. The feel of the earth beneath her fingertips (years and years of digging with Uncle Lamb, the plants she collected, the herbs she used to heal).

Claire Beauchamp would go back to a life she knew but no longer fit and she would force her way back into it. Even heart broken and lost she knew what she had to do, and she did it (some nights the thought of her baby Faith left in a graveyard in France two hundred years ago would break her apart, but she would still get up and go to work). The sound of cars would make her jump for months, and it would be years before she could hear a Scottish accent without flinching, but every time she walked through the hospital doors she felt a little bit of peace. Her daughter gave her comfort and pain in equal measure but she was also the proof Claire needed that it had all been worth it

Claire Randall had lived through one world war and Claire Frazer had stood on the edge of battlefields in a half forgotten rebellion. Yet when she woke at night, shaking and terrified, it was after seeing Fergus caught for stealing, Jaime offering himself to Jack Randall in her place and sometimes, the glint that had been in Geillis Duncan’s eye. When a co-worker had protested at having to work under the direction she thought back to a witch’s trial in a small village in Scotland, and didn’t let it touch her.

Claire felt wrong for twenty years (sometimes, with her daughter or in the hospital she could forget, for a moment, but every single morning for twenty years she woke in the morning missing Jaime Fraser’s arms around her). Then she went after the life she wanted, grabbed the home she had built with both hands and jumped through time to get it.

She didn’t let go of the name Randall (or the Dame Blanche, or the Stuart Witch, or the Sassenach, they were all part of her, and she had carried them with her for twenty years). But she’d made her choice, on a hilltop over two hundred years ago. She made herself Claire Fraser again and, even with all of the chaos that that entailed, she never once regretted it.


End file.
